Prosor: 'Name and Shame' Delegitimizers

Herzliya Conference: Ambassador Ron Prosor on what Israel needs to do when its enemies seek to delegitimize it.

By Elad Benari

First Publish: 2/10/2011, 5:35 AM / Last Update: 2/10/2011, 8:59 AM

Ambassador Ron Prosor, who serves as the Ambassador of the State of Israel to the UK, spoke at the Herzliya Conference this week, during a panel entitled “On Criticism and Prejudice: The Arab-Israeli Conflict and the Assault on Israel's Legitimacy.”

In his talk, Prosor sarcastically referred to the “absurdities” against Israel that are reported in the media all over the world, an example of which being the recent incidents in which sharks attacked vacationers in the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt blamed these attacks on Israel's foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad.

He noted the difference between the feelings of the public and the feelings of the government.

“The governments in Europe, and I would advocate that, are much more positively inclined to the State of Israel in comparison to the public domain – to the media, to what is happening at the university level,” said Prosor.

Prosor also presented his idea of what the response should be to those “hardcore delegitimizers” as he put it.

“It’s important to out them, name them, and shame them so that respectable organizations don’t coordinate with them,” he said. “My point here is that our adversaries are crossing the red lines all the time and we have to call it, because if we don’t, we risk losing what we really stand for.”

Prosor ended by calling on everyone to work together. “If we work together we might be able to really target the people who are trying to delegitimize us and to demonize us,” he said. “This is a battlefield and we have to conduct ourselves in this battlefield because this has become an integral part of Israel’s national security.”